Yunmeng Du Blog 10: Indianapolis City Directory Collection

Indianapolis City Directory Collection is a collaboration between IUPUI University Library, the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library (IMCPL) and the Indiana State Library. This project was made possible by a grant from the Indianapolis Foundation.

Collection Principles

This collection consists of 14 Indianapolis city directories ranging from 1858-1980. Books within this collection tell a great deal about the city history or people’s past by including the names and information about residents as well as businesses in Indianapolis through the years. Inside this collection, visitors will find addresses and occupations of householders, complete business directories, and much more.

Metadata

The metadata for this collection has been development very well. Pages from each book have been scanned and sorted by different categories deprived directly from the table of content. Such categories include ad, blank, illustration, titlepage, versotitlepage, contents, etc. The search engine is not only for this particular collection but also for other online collections supported by IUPUI University Library. The text for each page has been captured by OCR in order to make all search functions activate, in other words, a free-text search box is available to search through all the collection just like Google Book does. The whole site is powered by ContentDM. As is, the interface of this collection is just like other sites powered by ContentDM.

Object Characteristics

Advanced search is available for people to conduct targeted searches. “Preferences” tab is used to customize the display of results. “My favorite” part allows visitors to build their own library or collection to access a set of items they feel interested in. For each page of the city directory, a display function has been designed with plenty of fields to choose. You can easily zoom in or zoom out, move to different parts of each page, choose three options of resolution, rotate or hide/show thumbnails, etc. a list of labels placed above each page shows more options for users including “add document to favorites”, “add page to favorites” and “reference url”. The search box is put on the left side of screen but you can simply turn it on or off by clicking the button “menu off”.

Intended Audience

City directories contain a wealth of information for genealogists, historical researchers, and everyday history enthusiasts. When I went through the whole site, I kept thinking if Austin History Center could have such an online searchable collection, it would save much more time to do the building research or any other related research, which needs the primary documents such as city directories.

Hannah Norton Blog 10: Herbert Simon Collection, Carnegie Mellon Libraries

Herbert Simon was a Nobel Prize winning economist whose work also incorporated aspects of computer science and cognitive psychology and helped develop the field of artificial intelligence. The Herbert Simon Collection at Carnegie Mellon is a full-text digital archive of his papers including his personal papers, lectures and talks, materials relevant to his schoolwork and work at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, his professional publications, and awards.

Collection Principles
The Carnegie Mellon Libraries own the physical archive of Herbert Simon, which was presumably provided to the university directly by him or his family. The digital collection was brought into being through funding from an early IMLS grant (the copyright on the “about” web page is from 2001) in order to create a “Smart Web Exhibit” in conjunction with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. According to this page it includes 100,000 digital images (ie. PDFs).

Object Characteristics
Objects are primarily scans of written documents including Simon’s publications, course schedules, bibliographies, etc. Both an image and text are available. The image is a PDF of the document, which has not undergone OCR. The text is complete but littered with miscellaneous metadata. For example, the “text” of a bibliography contains this type of information at the division between each page of the original document:
..CLPAGE: 3
..PageImage: [image/tiff;00000003.tif]
[text/xdoc;00000003.xdc]
..OrigQlty: good
..OCRQlty: good
..ScanQlty: good
..OCR:
Apparently, this text represents uncorrected OCR, given statements such as “`Now at Slanford Univeraity.” This sort of thing is explained by the fact this is a relatively old digitization project. Nonetheless, the “text” version is difficult to read through and browse, while the image is impossible to search – not exactly an ideal situation.

Metadata
In the text version of each document a number of metadata elements are available, including document type, location in the physical archive (quite useful), title, and date. The elements mentioned above that are visible throughout the document indicate that data on the effectiveness of the scan was collected throughout the scanning process and that master scans are tiff files.

Intended Audience
The intended audience is clearly scholars of economics, computer science, and/or psychology. In fact, in the description of the collection’s contents, the following statement appears at the bottom of the page: “A working knowledge of economic studies, artificial intelligence, computer science, and cognitive psychology would assist in understanding the collection.”

Like other digital collections we’ve discussed in class, this digital archive was most likely quite an accomplishment at the time that it was produced, but is now outdated. Scholars with an interest in Herbert Simon (of whom there are probably many, since he is a Nobel laureate) will most likely find these documents useful, even in their current condition, but it is a shame that nothing has been done to update the interface to this collection.

Elizabeth S.: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec - Au fil des mots

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec - Au fil des mots

This digital collections culminates a project aimed at documenting contemporary quebequois poets.

Collection Properties
Each 25-minute video captures the poets in their own words as they describe how they go about their creative work, and especially how their works reflect and draw from the culture of Quebec. Some also read exerpts or full poems.


Object Characteristics
The videos are in Realplayer and Windows Media Player format. There are two resolutions available, Low (320x240) for slow connections, and High (640x480) for faster connections. An audio-only version in .asx format is also available.

Metadata
There is very limited metada, only the name and birthdate of the poet. There is a link, however, to works by the author available in the BAnQ via the IRIS catalogue.

Intended Audience
The style is meant to be casual and non-intimidating, ostensibly to appeal to those who might not neccessarily be interested or aware of poetry books or formal readings. Broadly, it appeals to those interested in quebecquois literature and culture.

Kempleel blog 10: The E. Azalia Hackley Collection

The E. Azalia Hackley Collection consists of more than 600 pieces of sheet music published between 1799and 1922, in the collection of the Detroit Public Library. What makes the collection unique is that it was one of the first in the country to specifically archive the contributions of African American musicians to the preforming arts.

Collection Principles: The digital collection was began in 2003, and is the result of an Ameritech Foundation grant. The Hackley collection has been in the library's possession for years, and was chosen because of it's unique historical significance. Initially they scanned only music before 1900, as it was in the public domain, but later the decision was to add music published through 1922. Future copyright status change may enable them to add additional twentieth century works. Further information about all aspects of the project can be found on the "Project Info" page.

Object Characteristics: Uses Greenstone, so this project has a very familiar interface. You can search the entire collection or go directly to those parts of it known to be by African American composers or those sheets published in Detroit. You can also browse the entire collection by titles, lyrics, composers, contributors, subjects and dates. Objects consist of high resolution color jpeg scans of entire music pamphlets, sheets of books, but do not come in more than one size. The scans open in a separate tab or window and preserve not only the music, but also it's attendant packaging, art work, and even advertisements. Also included on the site are a handful of audio files for some of the music, but they are sadly in annoying and outdated midi format.

Metadata: Yay, good metadata! Extensive metadata is provided, including dates, places, authors and publishers, some or all of the lyrics, a detailed description of the physical object, and both it's digital and OCLC catalogue ID numbers.

Intended Audience: Music lovers and historians, students of history and sociology, the general public and lovers of the obscure!

karyn j blog 10; Prigmore Family History Collection

Prigmore Family History Collection

Collection Principles

Dr. George T. Prigmore donated the primary research on his family history to Texas Tech University. The collection includes his family tree, photographs of Cleburne, Texas, and photographs of the Prigmore and related families. There is no about the collection page that supplies information about restrictions, when the collection was donated, or where the physical pieces are located. CONTENTdm is the digital asset management system used for this collection.

Object Characteristics

Each item has a thumbnail of the image with a title and description next to it. By clicking on the thumbnail or the image you will be able to view the image. You then have the option of zooming in or out. You can also have the image at maximum resolution, fit it to window or width, or rotate it. To the right of the enlarged image, a thumbnail with a movable red box allows you to select a small portion of the photograph to view.

Metadata

The metadata is sparse. The fields are title, description, and sometimes the date the photograph was taken. There is not enough metadata to provide the user with additional information.

Intended Audience

There is no mention of an intended audience, but genealogists would be interested in this collection. By looking at the family tree, they would get an idea of how to build their own or conduct research. This collection would also be interesting to the casual browser.

Overall, the website for this collection is not very good. The images are great, but there is not nearly enough information to go along with or describe anything in the collection. If i could suggest one thing, it would be more information!

Jesse Saunders Blog #10: America on the Move

America on the Move | Home Page

The "American On The Move" exhibit of digitized materials is hosted by, and is largely assembled with materials from, the National Museum of American History. This exhibit depicts the history of American transportation; and while it focuses largely on the effect of the automobile, there are also discussion of 19th century transportation, as well as modern container shipping and air travel.

Selection Decisions
The exhibit website does not contain an implicit information regarding how materials were selected to be digitized; however, given that this was an installed exhibit at the museum, and the inclusion of a broken link at the bottom of each page leading the viewer to "Buy The Book", it would appear that the materials in this exhibit were selected due to their inclusion in the exhibit and book (both money making prospects), with the web exhibit being a side-project.

Metadata
Although the number of objects contained in the collection is quite large, there is relatively little metadata for each image. The amount of metatdata assembled for each image depends largely on the contents of that image. Print materials, photographs, etc. appear to generally contain information regarding date, location, format, original holding repository, etc. However, photographs of physical objects, particularly museum exhibits, contain only information regarding year of production and producer. In addition to standard metadata, each image page also contains links to the sections of the exhibit in which they are used, as well as links to 'suggested' items which may also be of interest.


Object Characteristics
The images in this collection are displayed using jpg images with medium resolution on their individual pages. There appears to be no way to download high-res copies of the images. The mateirals used in the exhibition itself was produced with Flash, and therefore cannot be saved or used in any way offline by users of the site.


Intended Audience
The intended audience for this exhibit would most likely be largely culled from recent or future visitors to the exhibit. The exhibit could be used by teachers in the area of American or technological history as the museum does provide several learning resources for families/teachers/etc.

Jonny Grass Blog 10, DigiBarn Computer Museum

The DigiBarn is a museum based in northern California aimed at documenting the history of personal computers and the technological progress of their development.  It is managed and curated by Bruce Damer, and it presents images of computers, patents, manuals, and other documentation on the history of personal computing since 1975.

Collection Principles

The collection has been assembled by Bruce Damer, the collection’s curator.  Damer has procured each collection item through purchase of his own at various sales of vintage and recycled goods.  Since he has amassed these items as a personal collection, his collection principles are determined by his familiarity with various items; furthermore, since he is attending various sales to purchase collection items, which items he obtains are dependent on which items are available wherever he goes.  While there does not seem to be a specific unifying theme besides the theme of computer history the collection attempts to explore, Damer has attempted to organize and curate the collections, acknowledging: “It takes more than this to create a museum and we invite you to explore our collections and other parts of this site so lovingly created for your nerdly history pleasure.”

Object Characteristics

Images of computer systems have been scanned and made available as JPEGs.  Images are presented as thumbnails that can be clicked on to provide a larger JPEG in its own page.  These larger JPEGs can be zoomed in once, but not more than that.  Sometimes manuals, patents, and other materials have also been scanned as JPEGs, and can similarly be zoomed in upon once.

Metadata

Metadata for this collection does not seem to be very well organized.  Collection images of computers or machines are organized on separate pages based on the company who created them.  Each page provides historical information on that company, its designs, and its development; however, item-level metadata does not seem to be present.  Other collection items include manuals, patents, and other types of written documentation that could possibly be relevant to the images of computers; unfortunately, since these written documents have not been transcribed and the information provided in them has not been written on the website, they do not appear to be particularly helpful to the web site visitor.

Intended Audience

The site states that the museum “constitute[s] a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the nerd-inclined,” suggesting that the intended audience is the public in general, though specifically people interested in the history of personal computer technology.  The site also differentiates the museum’s mission from the Computer History Museum, identifying the fact that it allows visitors to physically operate the computers in the collection as one of its strengths.  Therefore, the web site and its digital collection is largely intended to pique the interest of site visitors in order to encourage them to visit the physical museum.